"Green Acres" it ain't, but we love owning and visiting the Hawksbill Cabin, near Stanley and Luray, Virginia, and a wealth of outdoor activities, including: the "World Famous" Shenandoah River, Shenandoah National Park, Skyline Drive, Luray Caverns, and Massanutten Resort. From time to time we'll post about other stuff, too.
As the number of blog posts grows, we've added a few navigation tools in the right column to facilitate getting around the site.

Ramble On

Monday, February 13, 2012

The Pork Diaries

(Editor’s Note: On account of the fact that we have a lot of pork to consume this year, and I will be in a constant mode of searching for recipes to prepare it, I’ve started a new label called “pork diaries.” This is actually the second post that will have that label, although it is the first new post I’ve written including it.)

Soup 'n' sausage - winter dinner.

Last week, Mary and I had some of the bratwursts I made during January when we butchered “Pork Chop” – there is a link below to that whole story, if you missed it. I have my worries that eating all this pork all year is going to get tiresome, so I’ve decided to do some diversification on the side dish action. As I mention in the note above, I’ve started to look far and wide for good recipes to pair the pork with – I have a list of recipes for what to do with the port just yet, so I’m really interested in diversifying the sides.

Brats, pre-grillin'!

So with the brats I decided we’d have a soup appetizer, and I referred to my copy of Simply in Season for some recommendations of winter vegetable soups. There I found Sweet Potato Soup, which sounded interesting enough. It even listed, as an alternative, a substitution possibility with butternut squash (or other winter squash), so I knew it would be a winner.

It was off to Whole Foods in Alexandria for the ingredients – the store is one mile door-to-door from the house, so it has become a work-out tradition for me on Alexandria weekends. I picked up some nice Yukon Gold potatoes and Brussels sprouts for the rest of the dinner. And some white wine…Big House White if you must now, as we didn’t have any of the local favorite vintages from Wisteria or North Mountain handy.

Sweet Potato Soup. Great color, eh?

The soup was absolutely great, another hit out of this cookbook (a hat tip here to David and Heather from Public House Produce for suggesting it). And due to the grilling method, the greens and yellows from the complimentary veggies were exaggerated – so we had quite the colorful dinner last weekend. And, as had been the case the previous time we had the pork, there were leftovers we could use in the next meal…in this case, a frittata Mary made out of the leftover brats.

As far as future posts in this series go, I have quite a few roasts to do, ribs, more pork chops, and even scrapple to post about. I intend to use a number of cooking methods for all of this, and assuming (this is a very safe assumption, by the way) that there is still pork during the summer, I’ll be singing from the “locally grown” hymnal again, featuring all those fabulous Page County Grown vegetables (and beef, chicken, wine…etc.!)